Exchange Messaging Outlook
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Greetings! Welcome to Vol. 6, No. 17, of Exchange Messaging Outlook, a biweekly newsletter about Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook. Today's highlights:
Regular features:
Office XP Service Pack 1 Office XP Service Pack 1 consolidates the updates that Microsoft has issued for the various Office programs, including Outlook 2002, since the initial release. It updates both the full Office XP suite and standalone copies of Outlook 2002 or other Office applications. For an overview, see: (Note that the Microsoft Knowledgebase has moved to a new .NET interface and is sometimes unresponsive. If you don't get the page the first time, just keep trying until it appears.) SP-1 provides general performance improvements and greater stability, lots of fixes, and at least four new Outlook features, including the ability to view all messages as plain text. The new error reporting tool built into Office XP has given Microsoft a vast amount of data on Office application crashes, and SP-1 apparently resolves a lot of those issues. Because all future Office XP updates will require that you have SP-1 installed first, SP-1 is a must-have update if you want to stay current and get future patches. You can get SP-1 three different ways:
We've posted a complete list of features, fixes, and additional notes on SP-1 at http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/ol2002sp1.htm, so below we'll just highlight the four new Outlook features we've been able to find. SP-1 - Installation notes As with some of the earlier Office XP updates, we've seen many reports of Error 1328 during the SP-1 setup. This error is supposed to appear only if Office has been updated by some means other than the normal patch setup, but it seems to turn up occasionally in plain vanilla installations. So far, we're waiting for information from Microsoft on what causes the error and how to fix it. The good news is that it doesn't seem to affect the existing installation of Office -- it just makes it impossible to install SP-1. More worrisome are reports that email accounts don't work after installing SP-1. It may be an Internet connectivity issue more than an Outlook issue. We'll post more information on our SP-1 page at http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/ol2002sp1.htm as we get it. You may be asked to insert your original Office XP CD during the installation of SP-1. If the installation appears to hang, check to see whether the window prompting you for the CD has popped up behind the installation dialog. We've had reports of that occurring on Windows XP Pro systems and seen a suggestion that it might be linked to a TweakUI setting that normally keeps a new window from stealing the focus from the current window. Once you install SP-1, you cannot remove it without removing and reinstalling Office itself. The one new Outlook feature in SP-1 that many people have been asking for is the ability to view all incoming messages as plain text. Users have wanted to be able to block HTML content because:
The "Read as Plain Text" feature requires a change to the Windows registry, detailed in the Microsoft Knowledgebase:
Outlook MVP Ken Slovak is working on an update to his very popular Attachment Security Options tool that will make the registry change for you. Note that enabling Read as Plain Text can have an impact on custom Outlook applications, because it affects both the Body and BodyFormat properties. We will be testing this and reporting back in the next EMO issue. SP-1 - Other new features The second new feature is a registry entry to tell Outlook not to cache passwords for POP, IMAP, or Hotmail accounts, so someone using your computer wouldn't be able to get into your mail count without knowing the password:
For Exchange Server users, there's a new registry setting that changes the dialog box that you see if you need to log onto an Exchange server that's in a different domain than your Windows logon or if security for the Exchange Server service is set to "none":
Finally, Outlook developers should be glad to know that Microsoft has addressed the long-standing problem of forms cache corruption, which often occurs if a form is published to more than one location. Another registry entry introduces a new behavior when Outlook encounters a problem with the local forms cache. Instead of putting up an error message and loading the default built-in form for that type of item, Outlook will now whack the bad cache entry and try to reload the form from its original location. We haven't had time to test this feature yet, but hope to report back in the next issue of EMO.
SP-1 - What's missing SP-1 seems to be a solid consolidation of the earlier Office XP updates, with some new features, providing a baseline for new patches in the future. However, it still leaves open a number of extremely annoying issues -- things that worked in Outlook 2000, but remain broken in Outlook 2002 for no obvious reason. The Outlook MVPs would be pleased to get any of these as stocking stuffers (please, Santa, please!):
And there's that business of Rules Wizard rules not working if Outlook begins to download messages immediately after it starts up. I have not been able to reproduce this problem myself, but it's one of the most frequently raised issues in the newsgroups, and it doesn't appear to be fixed in SP-1. By the way, did you know you can send Outlook feature requests to mswish@microsoft.com with "Outlook" in the subject and to outwish@microsoft.com? OWA issue in Exchange 2000 Service Pack 2 We have confirmed a problem with Outlook Web Access in Exchange 2000 SP2 and how it handles contact items that were created with Outlook (desktop, not OWA) using a custom contact form. In previous versions of Exchange 2000, OWA displayed such items as contacts. However, in SP2, OWA displays those custom contact items as posts, thus hiding all the contact information from OWA users. No workaround is available yet, other than not installing SP2, not using custom contact forms, or designing and installing a custom OWA web form. It would be great if Microsoft provided a custom OWA form with an installation/registration tool to customers for whom this is a problem. Sue Mosher on the air with Jesse Berst I'll be talking about Outlook on two upcoming "BerstAlert on Tech Success" programs on the Business Talk Radio network. On Wednesday, Dec. 26, at 9 p.m. EST, we'll be talking about Outlook secrets and customization and whether you should upgrade to Outlook 2002. Then on Wednesday, Jan. 9, at 9 p.m. EST, the show will focus on Outlook troubleshooting. |
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New Utilities |
EM FOR OUTLOOK http://www.boldonjames.com/products/productsmm.htm Military or secure messaging components for Outlook including forms that support classification and other P772-compliant attributes, connector to X.400 store, LDAP or X.500 directory access, use of Entrust Entelligence toolkit to sign and seal messages, document workflow based on Exchange routing, and automatic message and attachment processing. MAILTO_URL NOHTML QSYNC FOR OUTLOOK |
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Updated utilities |
CUMULATIVE PATCH FOR INTERNET EXPLORER http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS01-058.asp Fixes all known security vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer 5.5 Service Pack 2 and 6.0, including two new ones that could make it easy for a malicious sender to get a user to open a dangerous attachment from an HTML mail message. Supersedes the 13 Nov MS01-055 cumulative patch. LOOK MICROSOFT SECURITY BULLETIN MS01-057 OFFICE XP SERVICE PACK 1 PLUS PACK FOR OUTLOOK WEB ACCESS |
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Other new resources |
HOW TO SET UP A MAPI PROFILE MANUALLY http://www.slipstick.com/files/ManualMAPIProfile.doc White paper on the registry structure of Outlook MAPI profiles and how to use MAPI to add new entries. The author has successfully used this technique to add a MAPI store provider to Outlook 2000 in Internet Mail Only mode, where MAPI profiles are not directly supported. IIS LOCKDOWN TOOL |
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More Information |
ISSN 1523-7990 |
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Updated Jul 15 2008
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